Jeff Bezos Ignites AI Race With Bold New Venture, Project Prometheus

The New York Times reported that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is supporting Project Prometheus, a new AI firm, and will serve as co-CEO of the company. Bezos is contributing to the $6.2 billion in funding that the new business is releasing. Remarkably, this is the first time since Bezos' resignation as CEO of Amazon in July 2021 that he is assuming a formal operational position in a business.

Although Bezos is actively involved with his space startup, Blue Origin, he holds the title of founder at the corporation. Together with Vik Bajaj, who has expertise co-founding Google's health sciences business, Bezos will co-lead Project Prometheus. Additionally, Bajaj is a co-founder of Alphabet's biotech firm Verily. Additionally, he is a co-founder of Foresite Labs, an AI-focused subsidiary of Foresite Capital.

Why Project Prometheus is so Important for Bezos?

According to reports, Project Prometheus is an AI business that aims to employ AI for physical tasks, including medicine development, scientific research, and robotics. By stealing researchers from leading AI firms like OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta, the startup has already employed around 100 people. According to reports, Project Prometheus aims to create AI models that are more sophisticated than chatbots in their learning processes. It's noteworthy that huge language models learn almost exclusively by analysing enormous volumes of digital writing and identifying statistical patterns in the relationships between words and concepts.

They then create reactions that resemble those of a human using these patterns. However, the new AI business hopes to train models on the actual world and move away from chatbots' basic pattern-matching technique. Large-scale scientific tests are conducted by robots in the new system, and the system observes what works and what doesn't and gains knowledge from the trials.

Notably, Bezos made an investment in Physical Intelligence, an AI business that is also attempting to apply AI to robots, last year. The company, which has $300 million in investment and a lab in Northern California where it conducts scientific tests, is also working on developing systems that learn from the actual world.

Bezos All Set for the New AI Race

Last year, Bezos was asked what he was doing as executive chairman of Amazon in an interview with The New York Times. Bezos claimed that guiding Amazon through and taking the lead in the AI race took up the great bulk of his time. The billionaire has also drawn comparisons between AI and a number of other revolutionary technologies from the past, such as electricity and computing.

According to Bezos' statement from the previous year, contemporary AI is a horizontal enabling layer. It can be applied to make everything better. Everything will contain it. Similar to electricity, these horizontal layers are ubiquitous and include computation, electricity, and even artificial intelligence. "I guarantee you there is not a single application that you can think of that is not going to be made better by AI," Bezos stated.